Gardening for Mummies

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I developed a serious interest in gardening. My brothers cut the lawn, while I tended to the vegetable and flower beds. After a long hiatus, after college and after apartment life, I stuck my green thumb back in the dirt. Our first house in Brooklyn, the one in the shadow of the 'D' train, had a tiny patch of land out back, sandwiched between the house and the poor excuse for a garage. Most of what I planted was swiftly and savagely attacked by pests. Since I was loathe to use poison to control the nasty borers and fungi, and I soon tired of hand picking the worms off the tomato plants, I eventually gave up. Our second house, in downtown Brooklyn, had a front garden with a lot of fusty evergreens, which I promptly ripped out and filled with more updated plantings. This time the pests were human ones: much of what I planted was stolen within days. The back yard had an above-ground pool and brick patio. Sick of the plant thievery out front, my husband built a curving wall that we filled with dirt and loaded up with flowers and herbs. It was small, but in the middle of summer, it overflowed with colorful blooms.

When we moved to Costa Rica, I thought I'd died and gone to gardening heaven. Problem was, the house we rented came with its own gardener, who took it as a personal affront if I attempted to plant anything myself. When we eventually bought a house, we inherited a gardener with it. He only lasted a week because he was terrified of our dogs. We hired a new gardener named Jesus, a machete-wielding Nicaraguan banana maven whose Spanish I could barely understand. By this point, I had given up any pretense of using garden tools myself. I bought the plants, and Jesus did all the real work. He was an amazing gardener, responsible for the beauty of our lush little acre, not to mention our forty-square meter vegetable patch.

We live on a little more than an acre here in Rhode Island. Within days of our arrival, I was seriously missing Jesus. But I quickly got to work adding to the perennial border out back, filling in the yard here and there with flowers and bulbs. For the past three summers, I haven't been able to do any gardening due to my compromised immune system. Last week, I was finally cleared to once again play in the dirt. Except that I had to wear protective clothing, gloves and a heavy-duty mask, the kind you wear for asbestos removal. Wrapped like a mummy, and barely able to breathe, I attacked the neglected gardens with a vengeance, imposing order and a measure of beauty where there had been weeds the height of corn.

It's good to be back.